01/16/14 – Michael Ratner – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
Our next guest, our final guest on the show today, is Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
It's great to be with you, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here, and I hope you'll help me if I'm ever politically persecuted.
We'll be there for you for sure.
I hope it doesn't happen to you, but, you know, with this government, you never know what they're going to do next.
They're scary guys, these guys.
They certainly are.
Wow.
You know, actually, the local police are scarier than the feds, if you ask me.
I mean, those guys, they'll just shoot you and walk right away, high-fiving each other.
They don't care at all.
That's right.
Anyway, so let's talk about some whistleblowers and clemency here.
Edward Snowden isn't the only truth teller who deserves clemency.
That's the title of this piece that you wrote at The Guardian, and you're referencing both The Guardian and The New York Times call for Edward Snowden to be pardoned.
And that's a pretty big deal, actually, that The New York Times, especially, I guess The Guardian, we could see why, but The New York Times, even though they're publishing NSA revelations and all that, I guess I was pleasantly surprised to see them call for clemency for Snowden and that he should be welcomed home and that he did a good job and all that kind of thing.
Maybe I missed it.
Is the perception in the halls of power really changing about this guy, that maybe he really did do the right thing and maybe they could let him off?
Well, you know, I wrote the editorial in The Guardian because, obviously, I'm very pleased that two of the major newspapers, but particularly The New York Times, has called for clemency or amnesty or whatever term they want to use for Edward Snowden.
I mean, none of us would have thought that a few months ago.
None of us would have thought that because it was top-secret documents that he leaked.
It concerned communications and codes and structures and all that kind of stuff.
So it is pretty shocking that a newspaper, which supposedly is liberal, but it's not really, it supported every war we've ever been in, does come out in favor of clemency for Edward Snowden.
So I think there's a big shift going on, at least among certain parts, of what I'd call the liberal community in a certain way going on.
And in polling across the country, and I think one of the reasons, which I stated in my article and others would say as well, is because what Edward Snowden disclosed was about the massive surveillance system on every one of us.
You and I, this phone call, all of our phone calls, metadata, internet traffic, everything.
Just massive surveillance system that affects the privacy of each and every one of us.
And billions and billions of phone records and calls.
So we're directly affected by his revelations.
And they haven't yet been able to show that what they've done has led to even the stopping of one act of terrorism that was imminent or that there was any really need to do this.
So there's a lot of support for what Snowden revealed, and there's a lot of debate going on, and it's caused debate.
And Snowden himself has said in some way his mission is accomplished by causing that debate.
The president is going to be giving a speech on Friday the 17th.
It's going to be, I don't think, much of a speech.
It'll be a good speech probably because he's a good speaker, but it's not going to say anything.
It's really probably an attempt to paper over the controversy about the NSA and let a lot of the people think we're doing something.
So that's Ed Snowden, and it has changed, and certainly a lot of the public perception.
I think within the government, I still think they want to get Ed Snowden.
I don't think they're ready to give him a clemency or a pardon.
And we saw a recent revelation about Ed Snowden from the NSA guy who was in charge of the investigation into what harm was caused by his leaks, and that man who may have had the NSA said, well, we might be willing to make a deal with Ed Snowden, but only if he promises not to release any more documents, et cetera, et cetera.
And there was an implication in that that Ed Snowden still had a lot left that he may or may not have given to the journalists.
I have no idea.
But to this man, things can be harmful.
So there may be some room there, but I think the government is still very hard-nosed about giving Ed Snowden a clemency.
The reason I wrote the editorial I did was obviously I support clemency for Ed Snowden.
I think what he did was crucial.
But what I felt was missing from both the New York Times editorial and the Guardian editorial and from the public conversation we're having about Ed Snowden and was he a hero and should he get clemency, should he not, was all the other whistleblowers are out there.
And there's a lot.
There's two or three I focused on in the article.
One is Chelsea Manning, who revealed the Iraq war logs, the Afghan war logs, diplomatic cables, a huge amount of information about the criminality that this country carries on, particularly overseas, from torture centers to other places.
Then there was Julian Assange, who had a grand jury sitting on him in WikiLeaks for almost three years now, perhaps three years already, actually.
And he's the one who WikiLeaks published the material of Chelsea Manning.
And then there's Jeremy Hammond, who disclosed the Stratford documents, which revealed private corporations involved in surveillance, sometimes hand-in-hand with government, against individual activists.
What I said in the article, that the criteria that the Times and the Guardian are applying to Ed Snowden, and those criteria were three or four, they were very clear.
One is, were the disclosures that were made significant?
And yes, they said in the case of Snowden they were significant.
I would say yes in the case of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Jeremy Hammond, they were significant disclosures that were very important, government misdeeds and crimes.
That's one of the criterias.
A second one, was there any real, genuine harm to national security in any real sense?
Again, arguably with Snowden and certainly with the others I've mentioned, Hammond, Assange, Manning, no harm, and the government itself could not actually illustrate any harm at Chelsea Manning's trial.
So the second criteria for giving clemency, according to the Times, is met.
The third, which is related to the first, is were the disclosures of value?
And obviously for you and I and others to know that the Americans are running torture centers in Iraq is a very, very important fact that we ought to know and debate.
The fact that the U.S. is carrying on a secret war in Yemen, yes, we ought to know that.
The fact that we're supporting corrupt governments, or were in Tunisia, we ought to know that.
So they had great value.
And fourth, and the Times puts this as a criteria, there was no other real way of getting these disclosures out to the public than whistleblowing or publishing them.
And in that sense, a Chelsea Manning testimony came out that she tried to go to her superiors, was never able to do that, they wouldn't take it, and then she went public with the material.
So the real thing that's bothersome to me here, and really bothersome, is that we see a certain high percentage of America, perhaps over 50%, running to protect Snowden because of the revelations about what they're doing to Americans, but not running to protect Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Jeremy Hammond about what they disclosed.
And I think the reason for that is what I've been indicating all along, is that on one hand it's what the Snowden disclosures concern what's happening to you and I and each of us, and we're concerned by that.
The Chelsea Manning disclosures, for example, concern what we're doing to people overseas, particularly in war, and particularly in many of the cases to Muslims.
My conclusion from all of this is they all deserve clemency, they all deserve to be treated as heroes, they all deserve to be treated as truth-tellers, and basically lauded in this country for giving us what our government has not.
And so that's what I think is missing from this debate right now.
Right.
Now, Michael, do you know, by any chance, are there any kind of recent poll numbers on Chelsea Manning, and what people think about what she did in the release, and whether that was okay?
I should look that up.
I haven't seen any just come across in any natural way across my desk.
Because I guess I just kind of assume, but maybe it's the confirmation bias of who I surround myself with or whatever, but I just assume that, yeah, everybody loves Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning, the greatest American hero that leaked all that great stuff.
Are you kidding me?
And then I sometimes find that I'm surprised to find out that, oh, really, everybody doesn't think that?
There are actually people who side with the government?
And that's the problem, right, is what we are doing to the Muslims.
It's what the government is doing to the Muslims, in our name and with our money, and it's horrible and it's criminal.
And Chelsea Manning is a hero beyond question, better than Superman or, you know, the Green Lantern or any of them.
Oh, I agree.
What she did is extraordinary.
What was revealed about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is really, really chilling.
I mean, what she did was extraordinary, and the fact that she, at least by the major newspapers and others, is a forgotten hero is outrageous to me.
I think the polling would not be as good for Chelsea Manning.
The recent polling that's come in on Snowden that I've seen is sometimes over 50% have some support for Edward Snowden, which is obviously very good.
And now Hammond, by the way, he's the least famous of the ones you mentioned here, but he wasn't just, you know, being a criminal, breaking in and making money or something like that.
He was exposing wrongdoing in a true muckraking, Jeffersonian, free market of ideas, First Amendment, freedom of the press kind of a way, right?
It's outrageous.
You know, he gave us such valuable information.
You know, the main thing that came to me out of Jeremy Hammond's work with Stratfor and the disclosures of that private intelligence company is the fact that most people don't realize it, but the biggest problem here is private surveillance, often in conjunction with the NSA and others.
But some 70% of the surveillance and dirty tricks, etc., is carried out by private surveillance.
And that's what Jeremy Hammond gave us, apart from the fact that companies are hiring places like Stratfor to go after and look at what activists are doing around the world.
So his work was very important, and he has really gotten the brunt of the government's repression, both in Chelsea Manning.
I mean, Chelsea Manning is doing 35 years.
Jeremy Hammond is doing 10 years.
Now, hopefully, Chelsea will do significantly shorter, that's our hope.
I think that, unfortunately, Jeremy Hammond will be doing a large part of that 10 years because of the difference in sentencing procedures.
But they're heroes.
I mean, these people are – look, the reason we're having – the reason this country now is having conversations about a lot of this stuff, about the Internet, about surveillance, about the ways we fight wars, about drones, is all because of whistleblowers and truth-tellers.
These are the people who are making debate publicly possible in this country, and our government wants to hit them with fledgehammers, send them to jail for as long as they can, and hide the truth.
And, you know, come on, it's obvious to everyone that these kind of whistleblowers are the last hope of a Republican form of government at all.
I mean, even the Washington Post version of this world is that there's a gigantic top secret America, a whole new national security state you never even heard of, that grew up after September 11th, far above and beyond what grew up even since World War II and the Cold War, and how, you know, they have endless secrets that they're keeping.
So how are we supposed to know anything?
How are we supposed to hold them to the law the way they hold us to it all the time, if we don't have the truth?
That's all we've got.
Whistleblowers like these.
All right, well, thanks for your great work at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Thank you very much, and I really appreciate your coverage.
It's a really important topic.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, appreciate it, Michael.
That's Michael Ratner.
Sorry, I rant more than interview sometimes, but it is what it is.
I think it's just ccr.org, y'all, the Center for the Constitutional Rights there, and the piece is Edward Snowden and the only truth teller who deserves clemency is at the Guardian.
I think it might be on anti-war today, too.
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